Pastors: Minorities lacking in Clay schools

Beth Reese Cravey

Friday

Apr 23, 2010 at 12:12 AM

Backed by a mostly black crowd of about 80 people, two black Clay County pastors appealed to the white school superintendent and all-white School Board to increase the hiring of minority teachers and school administrators.

Black, Hispanic and Asian students need to see more people who look like them at the head of the class, and in the principal's office, said the Revs. Alesia Ford-Burse and Marvin Zanders.

About 30 percent of Clay students are minorities, while 4.7 percent of the teachers are minorities. One of Clay's 40 principals is a minority.

"It is very important for our young children of all cultures to have people in leadership positions they can identify with," Ford-Burse said. "They need to be motivated by someone who looks like them."

Superintendent Ben Wortham acknowledged the statistics and said he had stressed the need for improvement to principals and other district administrators. Also, he said the school district has and is actively recruiting minority applicants.

But to fill any district job, he said, the most qualified candidate wins, regardless of race.

"The No. 1 requirement ... is quality education and quality employees," he said.

The five School Board members said little and took no action.

But the pastors had already taken their case to a higher authority than the School Board - the U.S. Department of Education. Their April 15 presentation to the School Board followed a March 8 formal complaint to the federal education agency's Office of Civil Rights in Atlanta.

Ford-Burse and Zanders said in the letter to the Office of Civil Rights that the district had a "historical and present practice of employment exclusion" and had failed to "explore aggressive recruitment efforts" toward diverse hiring or to implement a formal plan to resolve the problem.

Also, Ford-Burse and Zanders said in the letter they met with district officials on March 5. At that meeting, district officials reported little success recruiting at black colleges, where they said applicants told them they did not want to work in a rural area. But the pastors said in the letter that they knew of Clay residents who work for Duval County schools, preferred to work in Clay but had no success getting on the Clay payroll.

Federal officials familiar with the complaint could not be reached.

The pastors said their initiative stemmed from the statistical research of a local focus group, which formed after hearing reports of employment discrimination by the district.

"We represent a collective group of parishioners, constituents, parents, students and the community of stakeholders being adversely affected by the identified under-representation of minorities within the Clay County public school district," Ford-Burse and Zanders said in the letter.

Ford-Burse lives in Orange Park and is pastor at St. James AME Church there. Zanders lives in Orange Park and is pastor of St. Paul AME in Jacksonville.

At the School Board meeting, they asked that a task force be formed to help minority hiring.

Wortham did not address the task force request in his comments, but said increasing minority hiring is an ongoing goal of the district's strategic planning.

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